Not All Content is Created Equal — Two Bloggers Found Out the Hard Way (Again)
Written by: Becca Paskerian & Lauren Mello
Your favorite content creators are back, and this time, we brought snacks. Since our last post, we’ve gained another month of experience, and probably a couple of pounds. You might be thinking, “Wow they must have made some serious progress over the past 4 weeks,” and you aren’t wrong. But you’re not exactly right either.
We haven’t changed much. We’re still the same coffee obsessed girls, causing a scene, standing on chairs, and using fake lights to ensure that we “get the shot.” We’ve continued to serve up great content and donuts straight to our faces. We’ve learned so many valuable lessons. Like, ‘always order more than you think you’ll need when photographing food’ and ‘don’t use sprinkles unless you enjoy finding them in your pockets, keyboard, file cabinet, shoes, and soul.’ Some of these lessons were more valuable than others…
The good news is, we’ve learned more do’s and don’ts of running a blog and supporting that blog on social media. Surprisingly, we learned more do’s than don’ts.
Do: Community management and A LOT of it.
Our lives have now been taken over by Instagram stalking. We spend hours, and we mean hours, everyday, liking, commenting, following, hashtagging, direct messaging and more. We’ve found so much success in engaging with other accounts and showing them some love, hoping to gain some in return.
Our followers have doubled in the past four weeks, but getting sufficient likes and comments is still a struggle for us. We want to foster an engaged community on our page, but it’s proving to be harder than we thought (not surprisingly). We’re learning that it takes a lot of research and time to find the people we want following us.
And all this time does not come without some hiccups. I mean, we’re only human. We’ve accidentally spent over an hour doing community management on what we thought was the Brand Content account, just to find out it was our personal accounts. Lucky for us, it landed us some new followers. Unlucky for us, it meant another hour of community management on the right account.
We’ve used hashtags we thought were really useful and popular, but then realized all the posts were in another language. Sometimes we just go with it, and we cross our fingers that Google Translate has our backs.
We’ve sent DM’s from our personal accounts, we’ve DMed users about their dogs (which is technically not the purpose of our account, but the cuteness was too much NOT to say something) and much, much more.
The important part of all this, is that the time is not for naught. Every day that we make mistakes, we’re learning. Every time we like a post without reading the caption, only to have to go back and unlike it when we realize that it didn’t align with our strategy, we’re learning. Every day we’re learning so much about the audience we want to cultivate and communicate with.
Don’t: Post for the sake of posting.
It’s great to have something to post every day, but sometimes we just don’t have that quantity, and more importantly, the quality of content to do so. Staying on brand is key. Our followers are following us for a reason. They like the type of content we’ve been posting. If we stray from that, or post something extremely irrelevant, we will lose their interest and eventually their following.
Having a cohesive page is also important. We want our page to look thought out and planned (even if it sometimes isn’t). It establishes a cohesive look and feel when people come to our page. This aesthetic is something that we’ve carefully cultivated, and we don’t want to post something off brand just so we aren’t going silent for a day.
Do: Promote yourself.
No one is going to believe in your brand unless you do. We promote almost every blog post on our personal pages (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). When our followers see how proud we are of the work we do for Brand Content, they are more likely to read our content or follow our page. Our passion is our greatest asset, and our biggest driver.
We always see an increase in likes, reads, comments and overall engagement when we share it with our personal connections. And to our knowledge, they aren’t sick of hearing about it yet!
We also encourage our friends or family to engage with our posts, specifically on LinkedIn, to increase the visibility of our content and get it in front of other professionals in and out of our industry. Sharing is caring and we have written this into our mission statement.
Don’t: Spam.
A huge part of creating and posting content is networking with other accounts. But there’s a fine line between engaging and spamming. We never want to oversaturate our audience and we never want to abuse the social media rules. Commenting an emoji on a picture may bring the person back to your page, but most of the time it’s a waste of energy. This kind of spam isn’t how we want to represent ourselves. We only comment if we have something to say. And we only like if we actually like the image.
When reaching out to other accounts, we are always mindful that there is a person on the other end of the phone. We don’t continuously message them if we don’t get a response. We definitely have to follow up sometimes, but we always try to avoid being an annoyance. People use social media as a break from their everyday life, they don’t want to be bothered incessantly. It should be a fun, stress-free environment.
Final Thoughts
We still have a lot to learn but we feel we’ve come a long way. We’re certainly not experts, but it feels like every day we’re learning something new. For instance, just the other day we learned that if you spill coffee on your letter board, it will take approximately 3 days for it to fully dry and will forever smell like cinnamon dolce. The lessons have been frustrating, damp, sticky, hilarious, and exhausting, but we’re loving the journey and we’ve got a long way to go. We can’t wait to see what’s next.
Follow Us!
If you’re interested in learning more about what we do and who we are, check out our website: BrandContent.com and follow our Medium channel Brand Content.
